iPhone 4G Gone Missing Drives Chinese Worker To Suicide

A Chinese worker has allegedly killed himself over a missing iPhone 4G prototype, Venturebeat reports.

Sun Danyong was an employee at electronics manufacturer Foxconn. He was supposed to ship iPhone 4G prototypes to Apple (AAPL). He got 16 prototypes from a local Foxconn factory, but soon discovered that one was missing. He reported the the missing prototype.

Danyong’s apartment was then illegally searched by Foxconn employees, and he was detained.

There are allegations about what happened to Danyong, which can be read in the full article here.

Later that week, Danyong jumped to his death from his apartment building.

We have no idea what actually lead to this man’s tragic death, but VentureBeat makes the case that Apple’s intense emphasis on secrecy played a role.

Taiwan-based Foxconn makes Apple’s iPhones and iPods, along with numerous other hardware devices for other international technology companies. It faces cutthroat competition from other manufacturers around China and the world. A leak of the next generation of Apple’s crown jewel, the iPhone, could badly hurt Foxconn’s business relationship with Apple. The pressure within Foxconn to maintain Apple’s secrets, then, is not surprising.